Stories which the walls hear

So how many people have you ever teased, in a friendly way ofcourse. As friendly as the shove you gave to your best friend just because damn they are funny, and as gruesome as the way you simply stood and watched something bad happen and didn't do anything cuz why should you? Its not your job. You can't say there were none, no one would ever believe you. You would say you didn't mean it, but does one ever? Did you ever wonder, to what extent this teasing went on to? What all insecurities that you caused to reappear?

This is not about something that happened to me, oh no.

Its about something I did.

Something bad.

The year was 2011, and I distinctly remember complaining about not being allowed to play on the swings. And grumpy as I was, I stood before my class II Tulip, that's the day when all the hell broke loose. Like every other kid, I was desperate. And no it was not for candy, it was the dire need to have a friend, someone with whom you could steal other people's stuff. I do realise that the way in which our minds worked was a hell lot of twisted, but if you must know, then I was eight and could not even write coherent sentences while being aware about what I was writing, so give me a break. Young minds like ours were completely awesome at group projects, while all the time we kept a keen eye on the fact that the person who borrowed our pencil wrote so much that they actually sharped it again, using to much of the costly lead which apparently to us was like diamond. So yeah, the usual.

See there is a well known concept of kid popularity, the more shoes you lick, the more higher you'll go, more preferably shoes of the teachers. And believe me when I say this, people actually fought to do stuff like retrieving teachers folders, carrying their bags and so on. For a while in the confusing bustling crowds of our school, I became like that.

But then came Sona, a girl who did not have to do any shoe licking and still managed the top facilities of popularity, like getting less peas and more paneer in her curry during meals. And not only that, she managed to steal the only friend I had made so far, hell she was my best friend for all I knew, lets call her Sienna. To say I was jealous would be an understatement. Somehow, a new weird looking girl had managed to acheive something which took actually years to build, and all because her mom was a teacher in our school. That right there was my wake up call, at that particular moment I realised what complete shit popularity actually was. But even though I had been enlightened, I was still surviving among the crowds of unaware kids, and so I did what I had to, I tried to fit in.

But the thing is fitting in is a lot more difficult than falling out. So I became alone. And even though I'm pretty much alone right now, being lonely is not something a little kid can handle. So I became desperate at any opportunity to gain a friend again, and I did, but only in the wrong person.

So Sienna came up to me one day out of the blue and I was more than thankful to atleast talk to somebody. It wasn't until she started bitching about Sona did I realize that I had made the biggest mistake ever. But, since I was eight and still believed that Santa was real, I became her friend. Day in and day out, she would be the perfect friend to Sona and then behind her back she would bitch about her, the worst thing was that I never stopped her. So not really knowing Sona personally came back and bit me in the ass, for I was horrible to her. Everything Sienna said, I believed. There were countless insults, that's pretty much little kids do as they don't actually know much about abuse, so... Knowingly or unknowingly I ruined six months of her stay in our school, for that was pretty much for how long she actually stayed.

The last faint memory I have of her was that she was having a nose bleed for she was ill and the teacher told her to lie down, the her mom came and then the nurse. That was the last day I ever saw Sona, from what the rumours told me, she moved back to Jammu with her mom for the climate change wasn't suiting her well. From what I remember and what I still think, was that she was really sick as in REALLY sick, and somehow I had made it worst for her.

And even after all these years, I still remember the fact that she was the only girl in our class to have actual brown curls as compared to our black hair, and that when she used to smile she had two dimples coming right up. The sad thing is that, I caused a lot more tears to appear on that face rather than the smiles. I still have her photo from our yearbook, she had a smile on her face, it was beautiful.

~theloner